The United States’ tactical successes in its war with Iran—notably, the destruction of a portion of Iran’s missile arsenal and the interception of the vast majority of incoming missiles and drones—have prompted a reevaluation of missile and drone threats in other theaters. Carter Malkasian, a professor at the National War College, argued in Foreign Affairs that these successes may give pause to other U.S. adversaries, including China, which might have hoped to use long-range precision strikes to carry out a war of aggression over Taiwan. After all, if U.S. air and missile defenses can significantly blunt Iranian missile barrages, why not Chinese ones over Taiwan or the wider Pacific?
Even optimists such as Malkasian note the limits of Iran’s missile force. Iranian strikes have damaged an estimated 20 U.S. military sites across the region, yet they have failed to seriously disrupt combat operations because Iranian missiles, while destructive, lack the precision needed for serious counterforce operations. This, combined with successful missile interception, have rendered them nowhere near as effective as initially feared.
The United States’ tactical successes in its war with Iran—notably, the destruction of a portion of Iran’s missile arsenal and the interception of the vast majority of incoming missiles and drones—have prompted a reevaluation of missile and drone threats in other theaters. Carter Malkasian, a professor at the National War College, argued in Foreign Affairs that these successes may give pause to other U.S. adversaries, including China, which might have hoped to use long-range precision strikes to carry out a war of aggression over Taiwan. After all, if U.S. air and missile defenses can significantly blunt Iranian missile barrages, why not Chinese ones over Taiwan or the wider Pacific?
Even optimists such as Malkasian note the limits of Iran’s missile force. Iranian strikes have damaged an estimated 20 U.S. military sites across the region, yet they have failed to seriously disrupt combat operations because Iranian missiles, while destructive, lack the precision needed for serious counterforce operations. This, combined with successful missile interception, have rendered them nowhere near as effective as initially feared.
But China is a different beast entirely, and the comparison breaks down when one considers how Beijing actually plans to fight and win a war in East Asia. China possesses far more sophisticated targeting capabilities and a much more advanced missile force, both of which shape the country’s doctrine and operational planning. China will not wage war the way that Iran has, just as the United States would not approach a conflict over Taiwan the way that it has the Middle East. These differences make lessons from the Iran war difficult to apply to East Asia.
The Iran conflict has also revealed a critical vulnerability in U.S. missile defense: radar infrastructure. By destroying some of the United States’ most valuable radar systems, Iran was able to punch holes in its missile defense network. Crucially, China has spent years investing in systems designed specifically for this mission, including hypersonic glide vehicles and maneuvering cruise missiles.
Without functioning radar, the entire missile defense architecture comes crashing down—and the U.S. defense of Taiwan becomes a far more daunting task.
After the initial decapitation strikes against Iranian leadership on Feb. 28, Iran retaliated against the United States and its allies with waves of missile and drone attacks on military and civilian sites throughout the region, using around 20 to 30 missiles per day. Because Iranian missiles generally are not precise enough to target specific pieces of small infrastructure—for example, individual aircraft or aircraft shelters—aircraft losses on the ground appear to have been limited. Iran successfully struck larger facilities, such as fuel bladders and storage tanks, but it could not undertake consistent counterforce targeting, especially with missile defenses intercepting a portion of incoming barrages.
Recognizing these limitations, Iranian leaders used a different strategy. Rather than betting on any sort of outright military defeat of U.S. forces, they have focused on cost imposition—raising the economic and political costs of the allied military campaign in the hopes of outlasting Washington’s willingness to continue the fight.
Iran has pursued this strategy in various ways, including drone strikes on housing portions of U.S. airbases and the use of cluster munitions on Israeli civilian populations, slowly eroding the United States’ inventory of interceptors. A combination of poor ballistic missile accuracy, effective allied missile defenses, the relocation of critical assets, and dumb luck limited the effectiveness of these attacks. U.S. troop casualties remained relatively low, with only 13 confirmed fatalities.
Where Iran achieved more significant successes was in its campaign against radar systems. Using cheap, one-way attack drones followed by more powerful missiles, Iran appears to have damaged or destroyed advanced AN/TPY-2 and AN/FPS-132 radar systems in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. If Iran had managed to destroy all enemy radar assets, then the United States and its allies would have lost the ability to reliably detect and track incoming missile attacks, as well as clarity on when to launch interceptors to defend against them.
China, by contrast, will not be satisfied with cost imposition. In a conflict over Taiwan, Beijing would seek an outright military victory over U.S. and allied forces in the region and the seizure of Taiwanese territory. It has spent decades preparing for precisely this contingency. Since at least the 1990s, China has modernized its aerospace forces around a joint campaign to take Taiwan, building large numbers of ballistic missiles as well as drones, both large and small.
The most technically challenging of these new systems are the DF-17, DF-27, and YJ-17 hypersonic glide vehicle missiles, whose ability to maneuver during descent makes them extremely difficult to intercept, and the YJ-19 hypersonic cruise missile, which can approach at high speed and low altitude to evade radar detection.
These systems are explicitly designed in part to destroy allied missile defenses on land and at sea early in a conflict. As one frequently quoted Chinese military commentator put it, “No matter how formidable a fighter is, how can they possibly fight if their eyes have been gouged out?”
Given the sophistication of China’s missile systems, combined with electronic warfare capabilities that Iran could never hope to match, Chinese attacks on U.S. forces would likely be much more precise than anything Iran has mustered. If Iran can destroy multiple advanced radar installations with a handful of cheap drones, then China could almost certainly do so on a much larger scale given its much more advanced technology base and broader array of capabilities.
This means that large sections of U.S. and allied air defense grids could be rendered inoperable very early in a conflict. If China succeeds in destroying these outright, questions about interceptor inventories and interception rates become irrelevant; there would be no way of knowing when missile defenses should launch interceptors if they cannot detect and track incoming threats in the first place.
There is also a broader operational problem. The United States would have to deal with these missile threats while simultaneously confronting attacks from Chinese sea and air forces. The operating environment in the Middle East is comparatively simple: U.S. forces only have to contend with Iran’s missile and drone arsenal. In East Asia, they would also face hundreds of fighter and bomber aircraft located in southern China, plus helicopters, surface naval forces, aircraft carriers, and submarines. Once air defenses are degraded, these forces would be far more capable of moving in and destroying ground forces than Iran’s inaccurate missile barrages ever were.
Malkasian calls for a rethink in U.S. operational planning that takes into account the United States’ successes in the Middle East: “Incorporating real-world performance metrics—such as interceptor hit and expenditure rates—from the war in Iran into U.S. modeling, war-gaming, and quantitative calculations could change expected outcomes in a potential conflict with China, which could help the U.S. military refine its operational plans.”
But as the above analysis demonstrates, these interception metrics were created under circumstances that are unique to the Iranian threat. Applying them to East Asia risks overlooking this essential context—and, crucially, underestimating China’s ability to degrade missile defenses by systematically targeting the infrastructure that enables them and exploiting the resulting gaps with air and sea forces.
It also risks overlooking the critical U.S. vulnerabilities that the war has exposed. Rather than being deterred, it is possible that Chinese President Xi Jinping may conclude that his country’s conventional forces, properly utilized, would have a good chance of defeating the United States in the field and on the oceans.
All wars have lessons. But there is a danger in applying a perceived lesson from one war or theater to another where it does not apply. History is full of such lessons; one that comes to mind is the story of German commander Gerd von Rundstedt, who based his planned defense against the Allied invasion of Normandy on lessons that he learned fighting against the Soviets.
Over the objections of his subordinate Erwin Rommel, who had direct experience fighting against Allied tactical airpower, Rundstedt decided to hold most of his armored forces in reserve so that they could maintain maneuverability and counterattack Allied forces, as he had done with success against Soviet formations. This, as Rommel predicted, would prove disastrous: The Allies’ excellence in tactical interdiction prevented many of the armored formations that Rundstedt held in reserve from ever making it to the front.
The United States is now at risk of making a similar mistake. China’s military technology is miles ahead of anything that Iran possesses, and China can use these forces to great effect in East Asia in ways that make any lesson learned in the Middle East irrelevant. Overconfidence against China based on experience in Iran could lead to catastrophic misplanning that would expose U.S. forces to unnecessary risks.
A better way forward is to break down the U.S. military’s performance in Iran, identify key failures—the defense of radar, especially—and think critically about how these individual problems could scale in a fight against China.
The United States cannot afford to be overconfident when walking into a potential conflict with China—it must assume the worst and prepare accordingly.
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